Stephan Lewandowsky: Disinformation, Misinformation, and the Fate of Democracy
When the Berlin Wall fell in 1989, democracy seemed destined to spread everywhere. Today, democracies worldwide are backsliding. In this talk I examine the role of misinformation in that decline. I describe how disinformation now manifests: as a blizzard of falsehoods, as the capture of public-health institutions, and as a “fantasy-industrial complex” that fractures shared reality. I then show how social media’s network effects, attention economy, and asymmetric algorithmic amplification favour low-quality and extreme content. But we are not helpless. I conclude with evidence-based countermeasures, from psychological inoculation at scale to platform redesign and European regulation.
About Professor Stephan Lewandowsky
Professor Stephan Lewandowsky is a cognitive scientist at the University of Bristol. He was an Australian Professorial Fellow from 2007 to 2012, and was awarded a Discovery Outstanding Researcher Award from the Australian Research Council in 2011. In 2016, he was appointed a fellow of the Committee for Skeptical Inquiry for his commitment to science, rational inquiry and public education. His research examines people’s memory, decision making, and knowledge structures, with a particular emphasis on how people update their memories if information they believe turn out to be false. He is particularly interested in the variables that determine whether or not people accept scientific evidence, for example surrounding vaccinations or climate science. He has published more than 220 scholarly articles, chapters, and books, including numerous papers on how people respond to corrections of misinformation and what variables determine people’s acceptance of scientific findings.
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